


All The Wrong Places

by captainpeggy



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-05-15 06:46:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14785505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainpeggy/pseuds/captainpeggy
Summary: The world's a big place. People are bigger.AO3 user captainpeggy, you say,is this another damn Beau character study?Yeah. Yeah, but this one's got Mollymauk in it! Some backstory considerations, some drink-buying, some reluctant friendships and some unexpected caring.





	1. Complicated

Beau glanced over at Molly. “So. Yasha. The two of you a thing, or—”

Molly snorted into his drink in a very undignified fashion, sending a spray of ale splattering across the counter. Beau scrunched her face up in disgust and wiped a few droplets from the edge of her mug. “Thanks.” 

It was sarcastic. He pretended not to notice.

“We’re a thing, but not a _thing,_ ” he said cheerily, regaining his composure. “I wouldn’t say I’m her type. Not sure if anybody is.”

“You know her well, then.” Beau tilted her head to one side inquisitively. “Would you say you trust her?”

“For me to trust Yasha would be a great disservice to both of us. I love her, absolutely. But I trust her about as far as I could throw her, which isn’t particularly far.” Molly delivered the heavy statement with characteristic lightness. 

Beau leaned in and lowered her voice. “You said, uh, you said you’re not her type. Care to expand on that?”

“Beauregard.” Molly’s expression was half quizzical and half disappointed. “You haven’t exactly been subtle about wanting her in your pants— why start now? Ask me what you really mean.” He leaned in too, but there was a devious smirk on his face. He was playing with her. “Are you _blushing_?”

Beau took another slug of ale and thanked the gods for her dark complexion. Caleb would have been the colour of a tomato by now. “I asked you a simple question, Molly.”

“What, were you hoping for a straight answer?” 

“Not exactly,” muttered Beau.

Molly let out a barking laugh. “That’s the spirit. Bartender! Can we get another round over here!”

“I’m good,” said Beau.

“I’m paying,” replied Molly. 

“Forget I said anything.”

Two more tankards and a handful of copper were slammed down on the bar. Molly tucked his coin pouch back into the dark depths of his coat and took a sip from the mug in front of Beau. “Mm.”

Beau frowned. “That was mine.”

“Was it?” Molly slid the other tankard towards her. “There you go. All better.”

“You want a simple question? Fine. Does Yasha—”

Molly held up a finger as he took another long drink. 

Beau threw her hands up in frustration. “Anyone ever tell you you’re an extremely complicated person?”

“Plenty of folks, Yasha among them. Anyone ever tell you you’re a bit of a brat?”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“You aren’t, why should I be? Yasha has a lot on her mind. She’s not been in a place for anything romantic, with a man or otherwise. That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?”

Beau sighed. “I—”

Molly threw back the last dregs of his ale and put the mug back down on the stained wood counter. “Sometimes when we ask questions we get answers we don’t like. But I could be wrong. I’m not a psychic.”

The thing that bothered Beau more than anything was that she didn’t really hate the tiefling. Well— she did. Beau hated easy. It was a flaw of hers. She hated him, but she’d lay down her life for him, because she cared easy, too, and maybe that was just as much a flaw as the hating was. 

That was just Beau. Hating, caring. What was the difference?

She’d been seventeen, far better acquainted with the taste of blood than she should have been at that age, and she’d fallen in love the way teenagers do— in a dozen ways with a dozen things at once. She’d fallen hard for the fight, the feeling of landing a flurry of strikes and the ache in her shoulders the next day— but the _discipline_ of monkhood, well, that hadn’t taken quite so well. She’d fallen for freedom, and that had been the end of it, really. Couldn’t live a life of discipline when all you craved was the feeling of wind in your wings. 

Not all. Not quite. Because she’d also fallen for _her._

Beau barely remembered her face. Midnight-black hair, she remembered that (curly and midnight-black all over)— slender arms and pianist’s fingers, wrists that Beau could wrap her thumb and middle finger around. She was sharp in more ways than one, in wit and in collarbones, built like an artist, not a fighter. It was fine. Beau could fight more than enough for both of them.

The details, those were what Beau couldn’t pin down. The little things— did her cheek dimple when she smiled? Did her lashes point out or angle down? 

What colour were her eyes?

But her body, well, Beau remembered every curve of that. The angles of her neck and arcs of her ribs, the rise and fall of her chest and the hollows of her hips. The way she tasted— that part had been new to Beau, and she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t been a little apprehensive, but they were seventeen and they had all the time in the world to figure themselves out.

They took their time, every time, and they lay tangled in each others’ arms for hours afterwards, her head resting on Beau’s bare chest and Beau’s fingers running through her wiry hair. It was everything, back then. They got lost in each other, forgot their fears, forgot their failures, forgot the whole world.

It was a love for the ages.

But, of course, it wasn’t really. The two of them— they were in love, but they didn’t love each other. Beau would have broken your face if you’d said that to her back then, smashed your nose crooked and told you you were crazy as you tried to stop the blood. Of _course_ she loved her. She was her everything.

But so it goes. Years pass, worlds shift. Everythings end. Beau told herself as much, leaning heavily on the edge of the washbasin and trying to figure out why she wasn’t crying (because people cry when they lose something they love, and what did that say about her— what did that say about _her_ )?

She was the first, but she wasn’t the last. Beau discovered that she could lose herself in anyone if she tried hard enough, give any woman a hell of a night and forget herself in anyone’s bed. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t personal, at least for her, and if it ever felt like it was getting that way she was gone in a heartbeat. 

She moved around a lot. Never got pinned down, geographically or otherwise— once or twice, at the beginning, she wrote home, but she never stayed in one place long enough to get a reply. But that was a coincidence. Just a side effect of the life she lived now (or so she told herself). 

Everyone did it, or so the Elvish innkeeper in Port Damali told her: everyone had to find themselves somehow, figure out where they were going, how they wanted to live. Birds left the nest unprepared, lost, and figured out flight or died in hours, that was the metaphor the innkeeper had stuck with. They could jump, or they could be pushed, or they could wait till they fell. It was harsh— almost cruel. Beau liked it. Beau liked _her._

“You’re very attractive,” Beau had said.

The woman had sighed and slid another tankard of ale across the counter. “This one’s on the house,” she’d said, almost condescendingly. “You’ll figure it out someday.” 

Week after week, month after month. Beau became alone in a way she’d never been before. The loneliness— that was nothing new. But being the only one charting her course, the only one with an opinion on who or what she should be… that part was. 

It took some getting used to. She was robbed more than once, ambushed on the road and made to lay out everything she had: the first time, she tried to fight back and was taken down by sheer force of numbers. The second, she threw her weightless coin purse at the feet of the bandits and strode on. She _continued—_ that was the word for it. The world turned. The sun rose. The gods watched.

And Beauregard moved on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thing rec this time is TAZ: Amnesty. Even if you weren't a fan of the original arc, this one's worth a shot-- they're playing Monster of the Week, and I spent five minutes trying to sum it up in a sentence but I can't. Weird town. Monsters. Band of misfits. All the good stuff!
> 
> Thanks for reading, as always. :)


	2. Cut Glass

“Your parents ever give you shit about it?”

Beau looked at Molly curiously. “About what?”

“The girls.” He ran a finger lightly across the edge of his blade, careful not to cut the skin. “Some folks don’t like people like us.”

“Me going down on girls out behind the brewery shed was the _least_ of their parenting worries.”

“That’s lucky,” said Mollymauk mildly. “Funny thing, mine didn’t object either. Ha!”

Beau sighed and leaned back against a tree trunk beside him, stretching her legs out long in front of her. “I’m guessing other people objected instead.”

“Oh, here and there. Drop to your knees enough times and someone’ll take it as an invitation to cut your head off. Didn’t usually go so well for them.”

The tiefling’s pointed teeth gleamed wickedly in the firelight, and Beau gave up a single quiet chuckle. “I bet it didn’t.”

“Was that a laugh, Beauregard?”

Beau shot him a look that could have cut glass. “Don’t push it.”

Molly laid his sword across his lap and slowly raised his hands, eyes wide in mock terror. “I wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, fuck you, Molly,” Beau said, but there wasn’t any anger behind it anymore, and she knew it showed. 

Mollymauk picked up the rag again and went back to polishing his blade. Beau tapped her fingers absentmindedly on her knee. “Who was your first?”

“Hm? Are we having a conversation now?” That teasing smile was back, the slight twist at the corner of his lips.

“Fuck y—” 

“A girl back in Abelard, when we ran a show out there for a few days. Ass-backwards town, _lovely_ women. I completely humiliated myself, but nobody comes out of the grave proficient in sex.”

“Cute,” said Beau. “You should get that embroidered on your stupid tapestry.”

“Who was yours?” asked Molly, sliding his now-shining sword back into its scabbard. “Your first. Some pretty tavern wench you corrupted?”

Beau shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We were kids.”

“I think it matters all the more for that. You know what I’ve learned from being young? It makes you care. It makes you idealistic and foolish and it makes you beautiful in that.”

“Careful,” warned Beau. “You’re getting sincere.”

“What was her name?”

“Drop it, Molly.” She meant it to come out venomous, but it just sounded empty.

The tiefling held up his hands and lowered his head, conceding. “Consider it dropped.”

Beau sighed and shifted her weight. “You’re not a piece of shit, you know. It makes it hard to keep hating you.”

“Oh,” said Mollymauk cheerfully. “Funny thing— it’s veryeasy to hate _you_.”

Beau smirked. “You’re not the first person to say that to me.”

“I’m quite sure I won’t be the last.”

They sat in silence for a long while, two shadows watching the fire and listening alertly to the sounds of the woods. Sparks danced like fireflies off the tips of the flames, spiralling up into the night sky.

Ever so slowly, Beau rested her head on Molly’s shoulder, and— to their mutual surprise on both counts— neither of them moved away.

The night passed. The sun rose bright and harsh, a cruel white in a gray sky: Fjord coughed himself awake, seawater spilling from his throat, but everyone knew better than to mention it. Jester distributed stale biscuits from the group rations and dug up a couple of old pastries to share among them. It wasn’t a pleasant morning, but they didn’t need pleasant. They just needed _alive._

It would do.

//

The more Beau traveled with the woman, the more she started to think that it was less about her failure to make her intentions clear and more about Yasha’s terminal awkwardness. As Fjord put it to her, she was being “about as subtle as a warhammer to the face,” but it didn’t really seem to be sinking in. 

Usually people _reacted._ Sometimes they’d be all, “oh, I’m flattered, but—” or sometimes they’d be disgusted, or they’d pretend they didn’t understand but you could see it in their eyes— that the way they looked at you had changed. Yasha did none of that. She was just… 

Oblivious? No. That wasn’t a word for Yasha. She noticed things just fine. The problem was that the things she noticed didn’t always quite mesh into understanding. She was an odd one.

And in a way, Beau was almost glad for it. You could fuck someone without knowing them, but sometimes that got in the way of knowing them later. Best to save the poorly-thought-out, god-you’re-hot impulse sex for people you’d never see again, folks in towns you were leaving the next day, sailors due to ship out in an hour. 

So there was something to be said for learning who someone was before learning what they sounded like when they came. Go figure. Beau knew that. She’d been trying to forget it, and it had been working, for a while. 

But when Yasha threw her head back with a roar, unfolding skeletal wings, darkness spilling from her form and shrouding her in shadow— that was when it sank in, that there was a mystery here, layers and layers of story, and this beautiful woman at the center of everything on the edge of it all. It struck Beau dumb in a way she hadn’t been struck in years, since she was a kid with the gentle melody of a flute in her ears.

Yasha was different. She was violence and rage and elemental fury. She was gentle, quiet, soft. She was a contradiction in terms.

Beau liked it in a way she hadn’t liked anything but the fight for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while, but here's Chapter 2. This week's thing rec is the book Neanderthal Opens The Door To The Universe. 
> 
> Love y'all. As always, kudos and comments make my day if you're able to leave them!


	3. Empty

 The sun rose. The sun set.

For a while, Beauregard really thought he’d be back. It’d be just like the fucker. Claw his way out of his own grave again, fight his way into the world just like he fought his way into hearts. Face down the reaper and hiss _I’m not done yet,_ draw his swords across his chest and light them on his own blood.

And yet...

Days passed, and he didn’t.

The absence didn’t hurt for a while. For the first week, Beau was just angry. Missed him, but missed him the way you missed a friend who you hadn’t seen in a while-- _hey, we should get together for a drink sometime._ Then it changed, because about eight days after he was gone, she woke up from a weird dream and thought _fuck, Molly’ll get a kick out of that one,_ and then she realized he wouldn’t. And that hurt worse than it had to watch him fall.

Eyes never shut. Not his, not Beauregard’s. She didn’t close hers for a while after that. Didn’t want to risk forgetting again, feeling the knife driven in a third time when she remembered in the morning. It was the finality of it all that got her. The shit he’d never hear. Never think. Never know.

Never.

His story was incomplete. There were things Beau was never going to know about him... things he was never going to know about himself. That was death, cutting off stories that had barely finished their prologue. But what a prologue Mollymauk Tealeaf’s had been.

 

“I never told him I didn’t hate him,” she said to Fjord one night, flatly, matter-of-factly.

“He knew,” Fjord replied. “He didn’t hate you either. Didn’t have it in him.”

“He didn’t like me much.”

Fjord laughed. “Maybe not. But he sure as fuck loved you. That was what he did. Loved easy. Loved unconditionally. Left the world a little better.”

“ _Fuck_ him,” growled Beau, a sudden wave of anger washing over her. “Fuck him for leaving.”

“Some people have to burn brightly and then go,” said Fjord quietly. “Sometimes that’s how it works. The brightest fires never last.”

“But he could have.” Beau shook her head. “He could have lasted. You’re trying to put meaning in this, but that’s bullshit-- sometimes that’s how it works, sometimes things have a deeper meaning, and sometimes they _don’t._ Sometimes death is just death. Sometimes loss is just unfair.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Fjord said. “Who am I to say? I’m just a fuckin’ mess of a monster with a magic sword. I’m no god, Beau. We’re all just fumbling our way through this shit.”

Silence. The fire crackled and spat behind them.

“I’m good for the rest of the watch,” said Beau quietly. “Sun’ll be up soon. You can grab a couple more hours of sleep.”

 

Part of her wanted to fuck or drink or punch the grief away, scrape her knuckles till they bled and let the pain seep out into the bandages. Part of her wanted to ignore it, pretend it never happened, pretend she’d never known Mollymauk Tealeaf and the grave they’d sat around belonged to some nameless stranger. And part of her wanted to learn from it, take it, take _him_ and move on. Take his cynicism, take his joy, take his willingness to fight a losing battle. Take his quest to leave every town better, toss a beggar a gold instead of a copper, find her own technicolor world and live in it in his name.

So she worked her way down the list. Keg was only a day or two after he was gone, when she was angry, sad, but not empty yet, when she still remembered how the light glinted off his swords and the way you could hear a smirk in his voice. That was where she started. Maybe it was a night of selfishness, but was it _really_ selfish when it was so utterly what Molly would have wanted? And could you really call it selfish when, well--

But that was semantics. It was-- _fun_ wasn’t the word. Intense? Cathartic? It was a hell of a night, that was what it was, and for a few glorious seconds Beau forgot about him entirely, forgot about everything but the high of their victory, the friends they’d saved, the calloused hands on her bare skin and the heavy weight of the woman above her. For a moment, she wasn’t angry. Wasn’t sad. Wasn’t empty either. She just was, and in the moment, that was enough.

The drinking was easy. Nott handed over her flask surprisingly readily-- not for keeps, or course, but for a swig whenever Beau tapped her on the shoulder, whenever the numbness started to twist and coalesce into pain in the bottom of her stomach. The booze burned her throat, but that was shallow pain, and it would pass. It didn’t mean anything. It was better than the alternative.

And as for the rest... Blood dripping from the corner of her mouth. Knuckles raw and splitting. Bones aching, knees shaking. Still standing. Still fighting. Still in the game.

 

Sometimes Beau felt like she kept going out of sheer spite, like the only person she had left to flip off was the reaper. Some mornings she’d open her eyes to another sky and feel nothing at all-- get up, roll her neck out, strap her staff to her back and put one foot in front of the other and her body between her friends and the world. Just like always. What else was there to do? 

Yasha drifted in and out with the stormfronts. Beau would wake up, and she’d be there like she’d been there all along, or she’d find them in taverns, sticking out a head above the general populace, or she’d appear with the flash of a blade in a deep cavern, there to carve them out of trouble, or she’d come across them as if by accident in the middle of a thoroughfare. And then she’d go. She always had, but there was a bitterness to the goodbyes that hadn’t been there before. Sure, they’d missed her back when Molly was still with them. But now...

 It was a second loss. Again. Again. Again. Another gaping wound. Another something missing.

 But the difference was that Yasha came back. And gods, did she come back.

 It had been a long time since Beau had fought with someone behind her. Even then, it had been another student at the monastery: a body at her back, another person breathing, another set of steps to account for in drills, but nothing beyond that. The strikes they deflected for her were measured, painful but not deadly, and the ones she knocked aside for them were no different. It was an exercise. Cold. Impersonal. Observed.

 

Yasha, though.

 

Beau might have called it hot a few weeks ago, and she still would. But the fire it stoked was higher now, not deep in her gut but igniting in her chest, a flickering of warmth and a flashing of fury. She was caught in the gusts of pure rage that seemed to come from Yasha in combat, in the moments before she cut an enemy in two, shoved a foe off a cliff, unfurled those skeletal wings with a roar of pain and anguish. The emotion rubbed off on her. It was different than her own anger, her stubbornness, her drive: this rage was rooted in pain, and it burned just as much as it warmed.

The two of them danced, in a way. Raw power and honed skill. Back to back, or flanking a greater threat, or catching each others’ eye from meters apart as they carved into opponents: everyone turned to them in combat, watching the two of them, waiting to see them take apart the battlefield. And take apart battlefields they did. One after another. Underwater. Underground. In plains. In forests. On mountaintops and cliffsides and ships’ decks and cobblestones. Sword and staff. Fury and fists.

They didn’t really train together. Not like Caleb and Nott, with their planning of tricks and tactics; no, Beau and Yasha learned from each other on the job. Every body on the floor was a tick in their grade books, and before long, their faith in each other was great enough to scare them both.

Beau didn’t realize how she’d come to rely on the woman until one particularly vicious battle against a horde of thri-keen cultists. One of the insectlike creatures had feinted to the left and dodged right, pincers scraping, mandibles clacking in the enclosed space of the cave, and Beau _saw_ an opening, a gap in its chitinous scales as it lunged towards the escape tunnel.

But she didn’t turn to swing for it, because Yasha was behind her, and so she didn’t need to-- there was a sick sucking sound, the _shhk_ of a blade through inhuman flesh, and Beau felt a spray of blood against the back of her neck. And she smiled. It felt good not to be the only one wading knee-deep through combat.

It felt really good, and that scared her. How she could stand to let her guard down now, take a heartbeat to catch her breath between strikes: the crushing fear of someone getting hurt because she was too slow or too weak was lighter with another set of hands at her side (and what a set of hands they were-- but that wasn’t the point, and maybe Beau would have smirked at that thought a month ago, but she had greater things on her mind now, higher priorities, higher concerns).

 

“I don’t think I can do this,” she confessed to Caleb.

He looked at her blankly. “Do what, precisely?”

“Keep you safe with her around.”

“I would think two very capable women are better than one, no?”

“She makes me feel...” Beau trailed off, groaned, rubbed her forehead. “Caleb, she makes me feel safe. She makes me feel like I don’t have to be so alone, even if it’s only for a little while.”

Caleb looked down at his sooty hands, picked a speck of dirt out from under a fingernail absentmindedly. “Have you considered, Beauregard, that maybe you are allowed to have that?”

“You’re one to talk, Mister Self-Hatred.”

“The two of you are very effective fighters,” Caleb said quietly. “You would like me to tell you what, that you are right, that she makes you soft and pathetic and weak, and that you must spend every moment of your life running from danger, fearing harm, in order to succeed? I will not tell you that, Beauregard. I am beginning to learn that it is not true.”

“That’s not _helpful_ ,” grumbled Beau.

Caleb looked up and fixed her with his startlingly blue eyes. “You did not ask me to be helpful.”

“It was implied.”

“Would you like me to kill her to assuage your insecurities?” Caleb offered seriously. “I’m not sure I could, but I suppose I could try.”

Beau muttered something incoherent under her breath and walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's thing rec is the book Scythe by Neal Shusterman. 
> 
> As always, thanks for reading-- comments and kudos make my day if you're able to leave them! I love you all and wish you the best of weeks. I'll try and have the next chapter up by the end of the month.


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